To help fix subways, Cuomo revives an old adopt-a-station idea

On Thursday morning, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the MTA will allow businesses to adopt a subway station, much as they can adopt a highway.

“The businesses can enhance those stations, enhance the maintenance, enhance security, enhance the aesthetics, there could be art in the stations,” Cuomo said.

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The price of adopting a station will vary depending on its size, but there are 72 “eligible” stations, 18 in each of the boroughs except Staten Island (which doesn’t have a subway).

Businesses that adopt a station in Manhattan will also have to adopt one in the outer boroughs. Manhattan station adoptions will cost $400,000 per year per station, according to the governor’s office. Outer-borough adoptions will cost just $200,000 a year.

In 2009, Barclays agreed to pay the MTA $200,000 a year to append its name to the Atlantic Avenue station, where Barclays Center is located.

Other efforts have petered out.

Ben & Jerry’s tried to adopt the 72nd Street Station on the 2 and 3 trains in the 1980s.

“They put some wooden or plastic cows near the station house and contributed some money to station upkeep,” recalled Joe Rappaport, who worked for the Straphangers Campaign at the time. “It was not a popular program, partly because there was concern that some neighborhoods would lose out.”

Ultimately, the effort failed, because the ice cream maker wanted to hire its own workers, and the Transport Workers Union objected.

Current international president of the Transport Workers Union John Samuelsen said this effort will rely on union workers, which is not to say he thinks it's the best solution in the world.

“I understand on a very pragmatic level what the MTA is trying to accomplish by getting private funding, but fundamentally, public transit is a vital public service and should be treated that way,” he said.

"We have fewer and fewer spaces where we can not be subject to the hard sell," said Mark Bartholomew, an advertising law professor at the University of Buffalo. "A lot of these are civic spaces."

Alternatively, businesses can, for a minimum of $250,000, join a “partnership sponsors council” that will work with the MTA to come up with new ways to monetize its assets.

The latter is an idea that originated from discussions between the governor’s office, the MTA and the Partnership for New York City, whose board is populated by Wall Street executives.

So far, the council has seven members, including BlackRock and Estée Lauder, according to the governor’s office. (BlackRock confirmed its involvement. Estée Lauder did not respond to a request for comment.)

Cuomo made his announcement at a colonnaded Upper East Side event space filled with New York City’s power brokers, and every citywide official but Mayor Bill de Blasio, with whom Cuomo has a longstanding conflict.

Speaking between two Corinthian columns, Cuomo said that every New Yorker should do his or her part to fix the subway system.

“We need to get private businesses involved in the MTA, which they haven’t been thus far,” he said. “We need to get more citizen participation in the MTA, and we have to change our attitude. This is our MTA, right? This is our transit system. We are all in this together, right?”

Cuomo’s own willingness to embrace the MTA fluctuates wildly, in apparent accordance with whether the MTA is in good-news, or bad-news mode.

Recently, it’s had mostly bad news. And Cuomo last week argued that the subway was actually the city’s responsibility, not the state’s.

This week, he has moderated his tone.

On Tuesday, his MTA chairman, Joe Lhota, unveiled a short-term, $836 million plan to stabilize the subway system, which is suffering from rising delays and service outages. Cuomo agreed to pay half the cost. Both he and Lhota want de Blasio to pay for the other half.

De Blasio has thus far declined, arguing that the MTA has plenty of existing resources, an argument seconded by the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas.

Thursday was no different. After the governor finished his remarks, the de Blasio administration released a statement saying “the Governor should return the money he siphoned away from MTA riders,” and “re-allocate the money he’s using to light up bridges.”

As part of his contention that everyone bears responsibility for fixing the MTA, Cuomo on Thursday also focused his ire on Con Edison, and said his energy regulator would require the utility to increase the system’s reliability by replacing old cables and stockpiling emergency generators, among other things.

According to Cuomo, there have been 32,000 subway delays due to power-related issues in the last year. Experts say some power issues are Con Edison’s fault, and others are the MTA’s, depending on where the particular issue arises. Cuomo presented it somewhat differently.

“When you were a kid and you had a train set, you had to plug it in,” said Cuomo. “We have to plug in the MTA every morning.”

Cuomo also called upon the NYPD to step up its enforcement against subway litterers, something de Blasio has said the city is willing to do.

"Littering starts fires on the track, and it is dangerous, and we need the NYPD to step up and do that role," he said.

The governor has been criticized for prioritizing aesthetics over substantive infrastructure investments.

In a gaggle with reporters after the governor’s speech, Lhota said that it was his job to improve subway service, and that is his primary focus. But that doesn’t mean aesthetics should suffer, too.

“We can ... do certain things to make the quality of life for the folks who are waiting— and I want them to wait even less than they’re waiting now — for the subways to come,” Lhota said.